


Children of the Wars

by Potboy



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Gen, I'm at my usual nonsense again, three characters sit in a room
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-15
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-08-02 18:22:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16310345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Potboy/pseuds/Potboy
Summary: Leia and a captive Hux have a nice chat





	Children of the Wars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Filigranka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Filigranka/gifts).



“For everyone's sake it would be easier if you committed suicide.”

Hux did not fidget in his chair, but there was a faint sound of clinking as the chain between his wrists grew tight. “I have had many opportunities to commit suicide in my life,” he said. “I have taken none of them. If you want me dead, you will have to kill me.”

Leia smoothed down her long grey cloak. She had not expected to be alive to face this dilemma, but life persisted whether she wanted it or not.

“Spare yourself the humiliation,” she insisted. “The trials will be long and all your crimes will come to light. The execution will be watched across the galaxy. And let me tell you, there is no dignified way to die.”

Hux smiled. “As I know very well,” he said. In holograms, his figure was strangely delicate. He looked like a ghost, an insubstantial thing. In the flesh, she was more aware of his height and bony harshness. His head seemed too large for his body, and his eyes are full of fire. Under the drab grey prison clothing he wore a necklace of bruises. He wore them with pride.

"I don't know what you believe about my life," he said. "But I am no stranger to humiliation. It is a useful tool, and believe me, I will use it."

He was still fighting for his cause, Leia saw with amazement. By now, one of the old Imperials would be claiming they never believed in the Empire – they were coerced. It was not their fault. She had sat through many a last confession, when she was young and disgusted, and they at least had looked at her with eyes that knew what they had done.

How was it possible that someone so young as Hux should be so much worse? Surely he should have seen by now, that no one wanted his New World Order. How could he be so blind, and so without remorse?

"What can you imagine you are fighting for?” she asked. “The galaxy has roundly condemned your evil. The republics thrives, whether you like it or not. Do you have no guilt over your crimes? Do you feel nothing for the wanton destruction of five inhabited planets?"

Hux frowned, "I regret that I was not able to finish the task that I started,” he said. “The sacrifice of five planets was necessary, and should have heralded a new dawn of peace and prosperity for the rest of the galaxy. I have no regret for the deaths of the bloated leeches of the Hosnian system with their obscene wealth and their indifference to the rest of the galaxy. They got what they deserved."

Leia turned one of her bracelets around her wrist. Silver glinted softly like clean water. So many old imperials, and every one of them had been at some point aware that their empire was a lie. There had been a self-awareness that she felt she could address.

Always at some level, they had been aware that they served the empire out of self-interest, out of corruption, out of fear. They had been greasy with defensive hypocrisy. Hux's feel in the force was different entirely from that.

She remembered his father. She had met him once, on a visit Bail Organa had arranged to the Imperial Academy on Arkanis. His father had been charming as a Sarlaac's smile. Mad, but cunning, and very aware of the main chance. At the very top of Hux's presence were echoes of that, as though the residue of his father is riding with him. But beneath that veneer seems to lie a buzzing pit. She could feel his energy, scrabbling at the edges of his mind, looking for advantage, looking for a way out. He was a desperate feral thing in a gentleman's coat. She had not expected that.

There is something about Hux's Force presence that reminded her of Ray; a solitude and a readiness to attack, like an animal brought up in a desert. He was wondering which one of them was prey.

Fundamentally, it seemed he was afraid, but not of her. She had not expected that either.

"What I cannot believe is that you still think that you will be the hero in all this," said Hux. "You overthrew the legitimate government, you brought in a Republic that failed. The entire galaxy is poorer because of your existence. Your hands are drenched in blood. How you have the temerity to come in here, and suggest that _I_ should feel guilty is beyond me. You started a war that cost billions of lives across the galaxy. You brought in a week and corrupt government that could not bring even the most basic necessities of life to its citizens. And when we began to address that problem, you raised your own private, illegal army and began to murder us, plunging the galaxy in war _again_. Where were you, when the children of the Outer Rim were starving? Where were you when the children of your inner worlds were sleeping on the streets?"

Leia was almost speechless, but she fought through it. "You ask me about children?" she exclaimed. "You who tore infants from their parents to feed into your meat grinder? You took children from their loving mothers, and raised them into mindless drones. You kidnapped and brainwashed your entire army. How dare you look down on me!"

"As if taking them from their parents was not the best thing that ever happened to them," Hux exclaimed. He shifted on his seat, seeming to grow even more rigid. " What are parents? What are our parents? They are an early psychological torture device. You allow vulnerable children to be brought up by people who have no training. Do you investigate how they are performing that sacred duty? No, I know you don't. There are no qualifications, no examinations to establish their fitness. _N_ _othing_ is required of a parent. No one cares if they beat their child, if they starve them, if they play with their emotions, belittle them, misshape them. No one in your republic cares. But take them away and put them with leading experts, who know how to nurture a child into a psychologically healthy young person - who know how to promote teambuilding excellence, self-reliance and trustworthiness - and you call it a crime."

"I didn't come here to argue child rearing with you!" Leia snapped. They were getting off topic. The purpose of this meeting was to offer him a mercy he didn't deserve, because it would be better for the galaxy if he died in his cell than if he went before the media circus of a trial.

His speech was bombastic, but it was full of passion and conviction, and there was a great possibility that he would influence his listeners across the galaxy. Much though she did not like to think about it, there _were_ areas in the Outer Rim, where his speech about the government abandoning them would ring true.

Leia had always pressed for more missions off relief and compassion to be sent to the people of the poorer planets, where the people were forced to sell their children and turn to cannibalism to survive. To give him his due, Hux was right that good parents might prefer their child to be brought up by their First Order than to see them starve. But it had been so difficult to get the Republic to agree on anything. Sad to say, his point resonated with her too. That she had expected least of all.

"I should imagine you don't with to argue child rearing with me," Hux scoffed. "Your son ran as hard as he could to get away from you. He came to us because he knew we were a better choice. Just as my children were the better; pure, strong, dedicated and loyal."

Fury leaped to Leia's tongue. But she throttled it down. She had no time to sit here arguing about Ben or even Finn with this poisonous little man. She wondered if she could influence his mind--force her way in and turn off the part of him that was still fighting for his life. The Jedi had been able to mind trick the weak of will, but she was no Jedi and Hux's will was as strong as durasteel.

His mouth had curved into a smile like that of a lizard. “But let us not get personal,” he said. “I have an endless well of things that I might say to you on the subject of your son, but apart from mentioning how happy I am to be in a cell without him, I passed them over."

He folded his hands over his chains. "We are here, I assume, to discuss what to do with the rest of my life. You want me to kill myself because you are afraid of your people hearing the truth. I offer you another opportunity. You could let me live, and I could continue to do good work for the future of the galaxy. I am not without resources. I created two impossible technologies in the space of two days. Give me a research team, and I will give you ways to feed the abandoned worlds of this and every galaxy."

A wash of cold went over Leia like liquid diamond. "Let me make this clear,” she said. "There is no way you are getting out of this alive. You are the greatest war criminal since Palpatine, and the galaxy is owed the knowledge that you have died. Your death will not restore one iota of what you have taken from us, but it will allow us to draw a line in the sand and say at last it is over."

"But it will not be over," Hux smirked. "Because you will not have addressed any of the problems that gave rise to us. We are an army that rose to combat your injustice. We are the voice of the disenfranchised. While there are hungry people in this universe, we will be here. You have never had a moment of want in your life, Princess. You don't know what hunger looks like. It looks like me."

Leia's earlier thoughts about the man's thinness--the bones and the burning eyes--came back to her then. The thought of something raised in the desert, something wild, something with no recourse but to attack whatever came past or die. She could not feel guilty about having been raised in unimaginable wealth, but it did make a difference.

"He has a point, you know." The small grey cell was awash all at once by blue radiance. It was Luke. He didn't flicker into life. It seemed that he had always been there. She could feel his presence as though he were still alive, still next to her, and it caught her heart. He had been so far away for so long. Why was he here now, when she had needed him earlier?

Across the other side of the table, Hux scrambled back in his chair, pulling at the chains on his wrists with a look of terror. The effect was rather ridiculous. He could see Luke, evidently. Perhaps he was just that close to death, or perhaps being around Ben so long and Snoke before that had left him a little sensitized to the workings of the force. At any rate, he caught himself at the end of his chains and stood blowing like a five-year at the end of a long race.

“What good will killing him do,” Luke asked, sitting cross-legged in the air as though he was on top of a sacred mountain. "I think it is time to do something different. Last time, we allowed the remnants of the imperials to run away, and they came back in a worse form."

"We are not the imperials in a new form," Hux snarled. “The imperials are a bunch of fat, self-satisfied has-beens. They were corrupt and incompetent. They lost the battle. They lost the Empire. They are the dross from which we have refined ourselves. The children of the First Order are the blade, the galaxy needed to cut out its cancer. We are the only ones with the will and the conviction to _do_ anything. The helpless have their rescuers in us. We are the champions of the downtrodden. And though I despise you, I would still put myself to work to better their lot in any way I could."

He could not stop speechifying, even with a ghost in the room, Leia thought. She heard his words, but they bounced off the ashes of Alderaan. She could not look at him without seeing the smashed pieces of her home planet. Tarkin had the same look as this; all sharp edges, cheekbones and teeth.

But she gave him this, Tarkin had hidden his ruthlessness beneath a civilised veneer. The First Order have refined themselves by torching the veneer.

“You can see me,” Luke said, surprised. He stepped down from his perch in the middle of the sky to peer into Hux's face.

"I prefer not to."

Luke laughed. “I can imagine. The Force has also shown me many things that I didn't want to see.”

Hux actually laughed. He retrieved his chair and sat back in it. There was sweat under his hairline and a tinge of grey beneath his colour. But he leaned forward and returned Luke's look of examination. "Is this something that you are doing to me?" He asked Leia, "or is this a genuine apparition?"

Luke smiled, "Apparition? I like that. I don't think of myself as a ghost, I feel more alive than I ever did. But sadly life beyond death is unavailable to you, General."

Hux reached out and ran his fingers through the open air, where Luke's elbow glimmered. It was something Leia had wanted to do when she first saw her brother's new form. But somehow it had felt like sacrilege. "What does it feel like?" She asked, without meaning to, overcome by the strangeness of the moment.

"It feels like prison air," Hux shrugged. "But Ren was always saying I had no facility on this. Perhaps you would feel something different. I wish I had measuring equipment. So many tests could be run."

"Ah," Luke laughed like a pop of static electricity in the dry air. "In that way you are very like your father. He must have spent years research into the Force. Did it do him any good?"

Huxs face, expressive as it was, did something Leia couldn't interpret. He seemed to have two sets of emotions, one on the surface, shown as clear as day, and the other beneath it, as if he led a second life in his secret heart, that sometimes came up to the surface. But she didn't know him well enough, to interpret that secret language. She wondered if Ben would have been able to know what thoughts were going through this man's mind? Whether they would have revolted him or whether he would agree with them.

"My father's research," Hux sneered, "never came to anything. He wanted to know how to induce for sensitivity in children and to control it once he had it. His successes were so rare they might as well have been random. After his greatest failure – me – he turned against the project. Yet I am like him in the sense that he taught me how to survive. It was a hard earned lesson, but I'm grateful for it."

"I explained, did I not," Leia repeated sternly, "that there were no was no way you are getting out of this alive. I came to offer you the chance to go peacefully and quietly with a certain amount of dignity in your cell. I can provide you with a compound which you can take with your food, which will make death like falling asleep. I can have your death witnessed by the senators of the new government and by no one else, so that you can be remembered as that fresh-faced young man, spitting hatred on the bridge of your Death Star. Instead of as a vomit-smeared body half-cooked in an electrocution chair. I know you're a vain man. I know this must appeal to you."

Hux smiled, “It doesn't appeal to me as much as the chance to tell the galaxy exactly what I think of you.” He raised his chin. “If I had been handling this, you would simply have disappeared. I don't understand why you're offering me a choice. Just hold me down and pour the stuff down my neck. You can and you should."

Leah might just do that. She didn't want to, because she knew it was what Hux would do and she had fought not to be like him. Not to be like her father. But good Lord, it would be easier.

"No," Luke said. "Let's revisit that idea of him doing some good in the world. Vader died before he could do anything to earn his redemption. Ben died, a tragic waste of so much good potential. This man may not be worth a hundredth part of Ben, but perhaps there is some good in him, and the galaxy is sadly in need of goodness. If it is, in fact true that this man was the mind behind Star killer and the architect of the hyperspace tracking beacon-- technologies light years ahead of anything we've seen before--just imagine what he could achieve if we turned into good."

"It is a little late that don't you think.” Leia. shook her head. “There is too much blood on his hands. The man is drowning in blood."

"Our father was a worse man." Luke insisted. "He enforced the Empire's rule for decades. Wherever people sought freedom, he destroyed them. Yet there was love in him. He did spectacular things before he fell. Perhaps this man too could do spectacular things if we let him. Why waste the good things that he _could_ do? Let us put him to work."

"The last thing I will do is work for you," Hux snarled. "You pair of sanctimonious warmongers. If you think I will do anything to proper the regime that you serve -- --"

Luke smiled like a shifting of glow worms and the distant trees. "I don't serve anyone any more,” he said. "I am dead. And my sister will never work for the government again. We have our own unfortunate father to live down. I invite you into the club of second chances."

"It is true that the new Republic's government will never work with me again," Leia said. A great weariness sloughed through her. Though she tried not to show it, the cold of space had settled in her bones. When she turned her mind away from warding it off, she could feel it leaching the strength out of her. "And it is true that I am very tired. I would rather burn worlds down than see you prosper in any way. And I know you feel exactly the same way about me. But, perhaps Luke is right and it is up to us to begin a new way."

The thought of sparing this man whose mind she could still feel scrabbling at hers like a rat in a trap was anathema to her. But death was already in her bones: the end of all things. The end of all potential. On the other side of that line was no chance to pay anything back. No chance to make amends.

"But don't think that means comfort. We can get you a computer and you can send in your work from your jail cell. You can revolutionise technologies from your jail cell. Where you will be in solitary confinement for your own safety for the rest of your life."

"The concept of safety means nothing to me," Hux replied. "But I presume some kind of staging of my death will be necessary? One must have the theatre after all."

"The pair of you remind me of each other," Luke remarked smiling. "Do you think he could also have once had a softer side? If he had not been made in an echo chamber of Imperial make by a mad brainwasher, do you think he could have been someone like you? Could he still have the fire but without the darkness?"

"I am nothing like her!"

"I nothing like him!"

Luke laughed again. A great weight seemed to have fallen off him with his death, and Leia found herself looking forward to that. Perhaps for her also a burden would lift, and she would find herself renewed and clarified. What would _she_ be she wondered, if she had not been raised as a spy? What if she had been allowed to grow up as a normal commoner? Without the burdens of responsibility for everything on her shoulders?

The thought made her reconsider Hux. Perhaps Luke had a point. They had both grown into what they had been expected to be. She was approaching the end of her life and perhaps the beginning of another. But Hux was a young man and for him there was nothing beyond this. If he was ever to have a second chance to do good, it must come now.

He was not Tarkin. Not a man who had chosen the Empire, but a man whom the Empire moulded from infancy. To a certain extent Hux was the result of Leia's failure. If she had intercepted the fleeing Imperial spacecraft, taken him from his father and put him in a good Republican home, what would he have been then? Would he have grown up to turn his technological prowess to good? Did she owe it to the universe to allow that potential to be realised now?

The shadow of her father had stolen her son from her. Perhaps it was time to bring all things out into the light.

"The way of the light is a way of detachment," Luke said. He was either reading her mind or feeling her emotions, and it was comforting that he could do so. Regret was like another ache in the bones. What if they had not been separated at birth? What if she had grown up with the twin who understood her? Who understood everything?

"And it is a way of letting go of the past," Luke gave a rueful smile. "There are millions of stormtroopers who need to be deprogrammed. He could start with that. There is work that he can do better than anyone."

Hux drew a long breath. He clasped his hands in front of him, holding them together with the nails digging into his palms. Leia could feel his suspicion like the tides. He did not feel reprieved. Paranoia, self-hatred, and fury formed a little sun at the centre of him. He jumped at shadows. Fear was eating him up from within and had done so every day of his life. _Yes,_ she thought, perhaps leaving him alive was more of a revenge than a public hearing and a quick death.

She had not stopped worrying and hoping for Ben until it was too late, but had anyone at all hoped for Hux?

She had sworn to save the children of the First Order, even though they were monsters who terrified their own creators. Finn had shown her it was possible. And of them all, Hux was the first. Perhaps she should save him too.


End file.
